MASTER’S THESIS Mahjong Club: Enjoyable Mahjong Experience for Various Players Author: Advisor: Zhanxi Shi Dr. Seth Cooper A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in the Game Science and Design College of Arts, Media and Design Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts March, 2017 1 Ma hjong Club: Enjoyable Mahjong Experience for Various Players by Zhanxi Shi Mahjong has been released for years, and lots of localized rules have been designed to make it enjoyable in different ways. Based on a set of competitive mahjong rules, this project focuses on minor adjustments to create an enjoyable experience for different groups of players. Iterated tutorial mode and balanced ability system contribute majorly to this project. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Game Science and Design in the Graduate School of the College of Arts, Media and Design of Northeastern University April, 2017 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Introduction 4 Background 4 Playtest 6 Iterative design 7 Conclusion 14 Reference 15 3 1. Introduction Mahjong is a traditional tile-based game with a history of hundreds of years. Similar to chess, Mahjong is built up with many strict rules. Different from chess, the players need not only strategies but also luck to win the game. Due to the disturbance of randomness, players need a lot of practice before they know how to improve their win rate. Even though mathematical calculations can improve players’ performance, but the complex arithmetical procedure is not enjoyable to most of the intermediate players. Hardcore players may spend hours practicing and searching for the optimal solution, but the innate randomness of mahjong could suddenly turn over the situations and confuse the player. Traditionally, mahjong is an analog game. Previous players set up different mahjong rules to meet different kinds of playstyles. Comparing to the competitive versions of mahjong, these local rules usually sacrifice randomness for skills or the other way around. In our project, a digital version of competitive mahjong is implemented. Featured designs are elaborated to help different groups of players enjoy mahjong. Limited by the scope of the project, this is a single-player version, and the other 3 opponents would be controlled by A.I instead of human players. 2. Background It is easy to find electronic copies of mahjong games, but there are huge differences between them. Many players recognize mahjong solitaire games, which are not what we are designing. Based on the mechanics of the traditional mahjong, there are many variations across the world. Mahjong is played with different rules in different areas. In China, it is played differently than in America, in Japan different than in Hong Kong, in Great Britain different than in France, in one region different than in another(Jelte, 2006, p. 11). In this project, a complete competitive rule system of mahjong is preferred to keep the game balanced initially. There are two versions of competitive mahjong rules: Official International Rules and Riichi Competition Rules . This project is based on Riichi Competition Rules, also known as Japanese mahjong rules, because the players are required to remember less to start playing Riichi Competition Rules. Limited the scope to only digital mahjong games with Japanese mahjong rules, there are still many forerunners. However, most of the Japanese mahjong games are developed for mahjong experts. Simple graphics and no introductions are common characteristics. T enhou.net is a popular online Japanese mahjong platform. Thousands of players from beginners to masters are active all day. Due to its simplicity, many mahjong artificial intelligence(AI) is developed and tested on this platform against human players. Tenhou.net is an excellent choice for pure AI development, but it is only appealing to hardcore players that already know how to play mahjong. There are also mahjong games developed specially for beginners. スーパーリアル麻雀 is a 4 series of Japanese mahjong games with more than 20 years of improvements. These series design attractive stories and characters and simplified mahjong from 4 player game to 2 player game. It is an acceptable introductive game collection for beginners, but definitely not enjoyable for mahjong experts. Both of these examples focus on specific player community. There are also Japanese mahjong games developed for all player types. Video arcade games are usually installed in public areas, so all the people nearby are intended players. Different from mobile games and PC games, arcade game players do not have much time for exploring. According to the research on arcade gamers’ preferences, players prefer familiar games with simple, easy-to-understand rules and play(David, 1990, p. 11). However, it appears that video-arcade-gamers apply a very similar aesthetics to the computer and non-computer games(David, 1990, p. 10). Consequently, a successful arcade game should be easy-to-understand and challenging, but not impossible, to win. In 2011, Sega released a mahjong arcade called Sega MJ5 . With years of improvements, Sega MJ5 has successfully meet players’ expectation of mahjong video arcade game. Successful mahjong games for all player communities not only appears on video arcade machines but also on consoles. Mahjong Dream Club is a console game published on PlayStation3 by D3 Publisher in 2012. With systematic tutorials for beginners and collectible power-up abilities, this game is attractive from the aspect of mechanics. Reviewing the game from the aspect of aesthetics, we notice that Mahjong Dream Club offers flexible camera movements and charming environments and visual special effects. These features improve visual performances vitally and make it more like a real mahjong game. Even though personal computers are built with hardware with similar or even better performance as consoles, we can rarely find mahjong games that include both elaborated mechanics and astonishing visual effects and experiences. In this case, PC platform is chosen as the intended platform for creating the enjoyable mahjong game for both beginners and masters. 3. Playtest Since this project is designed for players with different levels of skills, the playtests are held with 3 groups of people. Group 1 includes 3 people with no experience in mahjong. Group 2 includes 7 people with experience in Japanese Mahjong. Group 3 includes a pool of players that are familiar with other mahjong rules besides Japanese Mahjong. Playtesters in group 1 mainly focus on the effectiveness of the tutorial mode. All the playtests are held with 1 to 1 interviews. The playtester is given a learning task before each test starts. Feedback is collected after the playtester successfully completes the task or gives up when confused. Afterward, the project is improved to a newer version and another test would be held. 5 Playtesters in group 2 mainly focus on the general game experiences. All the playtests are held online. Everytime the project is updated, a working build is uploaded to the drive and an announcement is sent to the playtesters. Usually, no specific tasks are given with the announcement. Since these playtesters have played at least one other digital Japanese Mahjong games, functional exceptions, and uneasy designs can be spotted quickly. With the report from this group, the general playability of the game is improved. Playtesters in group 3 mainly focus on comparative designs between this project and other mahjong games. No playtest is held directly within this group. Questionnaires are sent to this group to collect feedbacks from general mahjong players. Answers from this group ensure that the designs of our project do not violate the consensus of major mahjong players. 4. Iterative design Design and development of this project can be separated into several sections. A set of tutorials is designed for beginners. Ability system is designed for intermediate players. Extra helper UI is designed for smoother gameplay experiences. Setting and statistics are designed for custom adjustments and reflections. 4.1 Tutorial Mahjong is built up with many minor rules. To become a master, a player needs to remember all of them. However, to start playing mahjong, a player only needs to remember a small part of them. The goal of this section is figuring out the minimum collection of rules needed for beginners and the approach of teaching these rules. Design round 1: The first version of the tutorial has 3 levels: beginner, intermediate, advanced(see Figure 1). Beginner level includes 6 parts, referring to general mahjong rules. Intermediate level includes 12 parts, referring to unique Japanese mahjong rules. Advanced level includes 5 parts, referring to tricky optional rules. Each part is directed to a short video with subtitles(see Figure 2). Finishing the parts in beginner and intermediate level should be enough to play the game. It takes about 20 minutes to watch all these videos, which is quite a long time. In order to keep the player motivated, a bonus system is added. Finishing one part gives the player 5 points. Collecting certain points would unlock extra game contents like a character. 6 Figure 1: the first version of tutorial mode Figure 2: tutorial video with subtitle Playtest round 1: The collection of rules selected in beginner and intermediate level is enough for players to start playing the game, but the playtesters want more practice before start playing. The videos are taking so much time that even patient and curious player may not finish them. The bonus system is totally useless and uninteresting to players. Design round 2: All the videos are compressed together as one, and only the most important moments are kept(see Figure 3). The total length is much shorter(20 min to 5 min). The bonus system is removed. The beginner level now only includes the tutorial video.